Gov. Mike Pence may be sanguine about the impact of looming cuts to federal funding for Indiana as the Friday deadline for so-called sequestration approaches, but his view is hardly unanimous across his government and related recipients.

At the Indiana Department of Education, where the White House says $26.2 million will go away if Congress and the president can’t agree on a budget package, “it would be significant,” spokesman David Galvin says, especially for children with special needs.

“That is obviously a population that doesn’t need a cut in services. There have been significant cuts to education in Indiana in recent years and another round will make it very difficult.”

While Pence extols the state’s fiscal strength and President Barack Obama’s critics make light of the relative size of the across-the-board reductions (estimated at about 5 percent), hard numbers and real people are indeed significant.

In Indiana education, the projected losses would include 190 teacher and aide jobs in regular schooling, 150 slots for those helping children with disabilities, more than 2,000 scholarships for low-income college students and 1,000 low-income children removed from Head Start and Early Head Start.

Head Start? In a state where liberals and conservatives are agreeing more and more that preschool is vital to lifting children out of poverty, and yet state funding for it has only reached the pilot proposal stage in the legislature?

It makes no sense to Cheryl Miller. She sees it as the exact wrong direction, financially as well as socially.

Head Start works. Parents clamor for it. There are long waiting lists. Only half those eligible are being served, and that number would be even lower were it not for the federal stimulus dollars reaped under the first Obama administration.

“They would be cutting into a program that’s already unable to meet the needs of the most at-risk children and families,” says Miller, executive director of the Indiana Head Start Association. And she means quantity, not quality.

“It’s such an important investment. The figure (researchers) throw around most is $7 (saved on welfare, incarceration and other ills) for every $1 spent on early education. After a year or two in Head Start, these kids walk into kindergarten ready to learn, ready to be successful. Studies show they’re not as likely to be retained, and down the line they don’t drop out, they graduate, they go to college, they become citizens investing back into their country.

“I’m always disturbed to see the number on the waiting list. They have no other option.”

Congress and the president have the options and hold the cards. As long as one side in this partisan, ideological war can pooh-pooh the consequences of letting the scythe swing blindly, the odds against resolution may be greater than seven to one.